Previews

Empire Earth 2

For the sequel to Empire Earth, the idea is to keep the deep strategy and streamline the minutia.

Spiffy:

Cool diplomacy screen, new graphics engine, war planner

Iffy:

New screens could be distracting, could "streamlining" make the strategy shallower?

The marketing tagline for the original Empire Earth was "Epic is too small a word." The final product certainly lived up to that billing. Empire Earth was a truly massive RTS where strategy gamers could literally shepherd a civilization from rock-throwing cavemen through laser shooting 'Mechs in a single game. By any reckoning, Empire Earth was a remarkable achievement for lead designer Rick Goodman and Stainless Steel Studios. It certainly did well at retail, leading to Vivendi's no-brainer decision to commission a sequel. The problem was: who was going to build it? Stainless Steel, the original developers, moved on to build Empires: Dawn of the Modern World, leaving Vivendi with a problem.

Enter Mad Doc Software. The developers responsible for the underrated Star Trek: Armada II, and more importantly, the Empire Earth expansion pack The Art of Conquest, seemed like a natural choice to continue the franchise. I recently had the chance to sit down with Brian Mysliwy, the game's associate producer, and take a good look at the game in development. Mysliwy told me that the team was excited to get a chance at working on a full version sequel of a game they had come to love during the production of The Art of Conquest.

"Empire Earth worked," Mysliwy said, "no question about it. It was a great game." The challenge for the Empire Earth II team, then, was to tear Empire Earth apart and find out just why it worked, then figure out a way to advance the franchise without losing the particular magic that captured so many fans of the original. In the end, what they realized was that the original game didn't really need to be added to or improved -- it needed to be streamlined. Indeed, one of the chief complaints about Empire Earth was that the game was just too darned broad. While playing, it became entirely too easy to lose focus on the overall strategic situation because the player had to micromanage too many things and too many bits of information were vying for the player's attention.

Armed with this key insight, the team got to work. "There's a lot of talk in RTS circles about resources and resource management," Mysliwy said. "In fact, the only true resources in any real-time strategy game are the player's time and attention." To this end, the first thing the team worked on was scrapping the original game's interface and redesigning the way that strategic information is shuttled to the player. The job was made easier because the team decided not to re-use any of the original Empire Earth technology, opting instead for a brand-new game engine that contains all the new DirectX 9 graphic bells and whistles, but will still scale down for older machines.